Ambient Strategy

I work with growing B2B tech companies helping them develop positioning that helps them stand out in the market and sell. I have worked with over 200 companies from small growing startups to mature fortune 500 companies.

Founder

Revolear

Board Member

ScreenCloud

MESH/diversity

Sampler

Sprint.ly

I was the co-CEO of Sprintly with the original founder after he and I acquired it from the previous owner. I sold my half of Sprintly in April 2017. Sprintly is an elegant, simple, Agile project management tool used by thousands of startups and custom software developers. Sprintly gives you and your team real time visibility into who is working on what with activity feeds and analytics.

Managing Partner/CEO

Tulip Retail

Tulip is powering the next generation of customer-centric retail experiences across the web, mobile devices and physical stores. I was responsible for Sales, Marketing, Solutions deployment, and Customer Success. I repositioned the company from a generic omni-channel retail back-end to a platform for sales associates for large retailers. I closed Tulip's first customers, secured customer references and built a pipeline from zero to millions. I recruited the first hires in sales and marketing and developed and instrumented the sales process.

Huawei

Working as a consultant my role was to establish a marketing function in Silicon Valley to support Huawei's Enterprise business globally. Provided Enterprise Marketing foundation that expanded Huawei's business from launch to over $3B in under 2 years.

Vice President Marketing (acting), Enterprise Products

SolarSoft Business Systems (Acquired by Epicor)

Managed the marketing and inside sales teams generating qualified leads for $80M revenue with 50% growth. Deployed systemic email and content marketing efforts and oversaw both a Salesforce and Eloqua deployment internally.

Vice President Marketing

Nortel

Working as part of the CMO's office, I worked with the global CTO to create, launch and manage an internal incubator focused on developing and nurturing new products that did not fit into Nortel's existing organizational structure. Several of these projects went on to be spun out into venture-backed startups.

Head, Enterprise Incubation

Positioning for tech companies. Author of the best-selling books Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch.

April Dunford is the world's foremost authority on product positioning for B2B technology companies. As a consultant, April helps companies make complex products easy to understand and love. After a 25-year career as a VP of Marketing at various fast-growing technology firms, she has consulted with 300 technology companies, including Google, Epic Games, Postman, and others. April is the acclaimed author of the best-selling book, "Obviously Awesome," which delves into the art of positioning, and the newly released, "Sales Pitch," which unveils the secrets to crafting a winning sales narrative in the market.

I'm reading "The Framemaking Sale," and it's great. The authors (Brent Adamson & Karl Schmidt) make a great point contrasting how vendors THINK they inspire confidence in a buyer vs. what buyers need. 

Example claims vendors make to inspire buyer confidence:
⏺️ "Trusted by 80% of the Fortune 500"
⏺️ "The industry leader"
⏺️ "Trusted by [insert logo here]"

Versus the questions customers are trying to answer to get more confidence in a purchase:
⏺️ "How confident are we that WE have thoroughly explored the alternatives?"
⏺️ "How confident are we that WE can implement the chosen solution?"
⏺️ "How confident are we that WE have made the best choice for our company?"

Buyer confidence isn't about customer confidence in us as a vendor. It's about a buyer's own confidence in their ability to make a good decision. We win not by selling harder, but by helping customers figure out how to buy confidently.

April Dunford

The manufacturer of the ladder truck used in the Louvre heist is running an ad that says, "When you have to move fast." Proof of value comes in many forms 🙂

I'm speaking at Turing X SYSTM Growth Summit in London November 6th. I was SUPPOSED to speak there last year. That plan was derailed by a horrible family tragedy. These folks were gracious, kind, and understanding about my need to bow out at the absolute last minute and will now forever be on my "very good people" list (yeah I'm looking at you Brian Corcoran and Matt Lerner). May all of you out there have the good fortune to work with such awesome folks.

The whole conference is gonna be great! I'm covering some new stuff in my talk about some of the more advanced things I've learned over the past 10 years working with an absolute boat-load of tech companies on their positioning. 

Join us! I can even hook you up with a sweet 15% discount code - APRIL15 
Link in the comments.

Taplio

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